I was born in 1959 and brought up in Gloucestershire, England. I now live in the North of Scotland. My postal address is:
21e Balnakeil
Durness
Lairg
Sutherland
IV27 4PT
Scotland, UK
Academic Background:
1977-80 Cambridge University: Mathematics Degree, First Class
1980-81 Warwick University: MSc in Pure Mathematics
1981-83 Warwick University: PhD in Group Theory
Then I did a bit of a career swerve... I moved to my present address in 1983 and made my living as an artist (landscapes in oils and watercolours) for many years. I have a gallery attached to my house. This was full time until 1991, but programming has taken over more and more since then. I became interested in AI and Machine Vision around 1986 and did a lot of pen-and-paper work before buying an Acorn Archimedes A440 in 1989. I taught myself programming, first in Basic and assembler, then C.
I started writing commercial programs for Acorn RISC OS machines in 1991. I wrote Hard Disc Companion (version 2.0), Desktop Thesaurus, FairIsle, and the text OCR program Sleuth (all versions). FairIsle is distributed by iSV Products, the others by Beebug; all are written in C. I started work on the music OCR program SharpEye in 1996. I released the first version of SharpEye in 1999, with improved versions following in later years. SharpEye is recognised as one of the most accurate music OCR programs in the world. Two large-scale academic studies put SharpEye ahead of the competition (see refs below). I transferred rights in SharpEye to another company in 2006.
Publications:
The Influence of Nilpotent Subgroups on the Nilpotent Length and Derived Length of a Finite Group, Proc. London Math Soc. (3), 49 (1984) 343-360.
(with Trevor Hawkes) On the Structure of a Group Whose Orbits on a finite Module Are the Orbits of a proper Subgroup, Journal of Algebra, 84 (1985).
Image Segmentation using Texture Boundary detection, Pattern Recognition Letters, 15 (1994) 533-541.
Various articles in CVu, CAUGers, and Overload which are published by The Association of C and C++ Users (1993-98).
References for SharpEye:
D. Byrd, Prospects for Improving OMR with Multiple Recognizers, ISMIR 2006, 7th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval. Direct link to PDF file
K.C. Ng, J. Barthelmy, B. Ong, I. Bruno, and P. Nesi, (2005). CIMS: Coding Images of Music Sheets, version 3.4. Interactive MusicNetwork working paper, 2005. Available from www.interactivemusicnetwork.org. Direct link to PDF file
See http://www.durness.org for information
about the area I live in.